Random stuff about Wellington since 2005

Books

Last week, Wellingtonista’s ace literary team was lucky enough to get invited along to the pre-launch Writers’ Week Welcome, held within the Museum Art Hotel‘s very swanky Billiards Room. Following on from last year’s sale of the Courtenay-district landmark (let’s not go busting out the dreaded “iconic” just yet) to Sydney-based EVT (Event, Hospitality and […]

Instead kicking off on all the amazing books you’ll find at Bookfair this weekend. I thought you might like to know how cold it’s been in Wellington, last night it was 2.7°C in Kelburn overnight, with a light dusting of snow. Snow is fun except when you don’t have a place to call home, to store your belongings, […]

Bridget Williams Books publishes a series called BWB Texts, “short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers”, and two new ones will be launched next Thursday at Unity Books. Martin Edmond’s Barefoot Years recounts childhood memories of life near Ohakune, while Thorndon: Wellington and Home, My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn (Rain, The Big Music) will be of […]

It’s true i get excited by books, and every year i get excited by the Annual DCM Bookfair, which lucky for my excitement meter (which dipped a bit post film festival) is on this weekend. At The DCM Bookfair you’ll find over 90,000 books Books, Magazine, Comics, Graphic Novels, jigsaw-puzzles, games, DVDs, CDs, Vinyl Records, Stamps …. […]

The latest book from local speculative fiction publishers Steam Press is the début novel of nineteen-year old Summer Wigmore. It’s a wonderful urban fantasy, set quite concretely in the very real environs of modern-day Wellington, but populated throughout with mythical characters and creatures from Maori folklore (collectively known as iwi atua). Our two main protagonists […]

Saturday is Wellington’s most amazing, most awesome, most excellent, book related event of the year – The DCM Annual Bookfair Take 90000+ books, add LPs, CDs, DVDs, Cassettes, Magazines, Jigsaw Puzzles & Games galore. Everyone going to bookfair has a strategy for this is one of those very few shopping events when you can’t spend ‘too […]

here’s a sneak peek into the food bank shelves at DCM this afternoon – empty! As we know from Game ofThrones, winter is coming. So this weekend If you’re planning to visit Chaffers New World, please buy a couple extra items and pop then in DCM’s foodbank bins at the exit. Things like tuna and tinned stews are […]

It’s not by chance that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s was the setting that would become the default template for the popular notion of high-fantasy; no arbitrary circumstance that led to Tolkien’s intricately-crafted argot becoming the lingua franca of the sword-and-sorcery genre as it’s commonly understood today. Tolkien, with his fellow Inkling and understudy in Christianity […]